We have at least laid the basis of a formidable and well-organized party, in opposition to the spread of slavery—that scheme which is the scandal of the country and the age. In those States of the Union which have now given such large majorities for Fremont, public opinion, which till lately has been shuffling and undecided in regard to the slavery question, is now clear, fixed, and resolute. If we look back to 1848, when we conducted a Presidential election on this very ground of opposition to the spread of slavery, we shall see that we have made immense strides towards the ascendancy which, if there be any grounds to hope for the perpetuity of free institutions, is yet to be ours. We were then comparatively weak, we are now strong; we then counted our thousands, we now count our millions; we could then point to our respectable minorities in a few States, we now point to State after State.... The cause is not going back—it is going rapidly forward; the free-soil party of 1848 is the nucleus of the Republican party of 1856; but with what accessions of numbers, of moral power, of influence, not merely in public assemblies, but at the domestic fireside!
The Evening Post was now as firmly a “black Republican” organ as the Tribune, and far more radical in tone than Henry J. Raymond’s Times. When in May, 1856, Brooks of South Carolina beat Sumner into insensibility at his desk in the Senate Chamber, it saw in the episode no mere flash of Southern hotheadedness, but evidence of a deep and consistent menace. It was a “base assault,” a bit of “cowardly brutality.” “Are we, too, slaves—slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” But Bryant looked below the symptom to its cause:
Violence reigns in the streets of Washington ... violence has now found its way into the Senate chamber. Violence lies in wait on all the navigable rivers and all the railways of Missouri, to obstruct those who pass from the free States into Kansas. Violence overhangs the frontiers of that territory like a storm-cloud charged with hail and lightning. Violence has carried election after election in that territory.... In short, violence is the order of the day; the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the free States are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent.
Already the Evening Post had fitful glimpses of the furnace into which this violence was leading. Under the heading, “A Short Method with Disunionists,” Bryant (Sept. 26, 1855) had said that secession must be throttled as Jackson throttled it in South Carolina. The newspaper already regarded slavery as an evil to be stamped out altogether, though it did not quite say so. Gov. Wise of Virginia deplored the failure to open up California as a slave market. Bryant explained this by pointing out that the natural increase of Virginia’s black population exceeded 23,000 souls a year, which at $1,000 each came to more than $23,000,000. The annual production of wheat in Virginia had by the last census been worth only $11,000,000. Since the extension of the slave market to Texas had doubled the price of negroes, it was no wonder that Virginia wished it pushed to the Pacific. “Such a state of things may be very proper if the duty and destiny of this great country are to breed slaves and hunt runaway human cattle. But how incompatible with a genuine Christian civilization! How it moves the pride and curls the lip of European despotism! How it strikes down the power and crushes the hopes of the struggling friends of freedom all over the world!”
The excitement produced by the Dred Scott decision in March, 1857, is evinced by the fact that upon eight successive days the Evening Post devoted a leading or an important editorial to Chief Justice Taney’s opinion. It was not unexpected: the paper had uttered angry words in 1855 over a decision by a lower court foreshadowing it. But, opening all Territories North and South to slavery, it seemed intolerable. Bryant, on the point of sailing for Europe, took the view that in fact it was so intolerable the American people would never accept its practical implications. He believed the opinion of the court so superficial and shallow that it would be respected nowhere, and compared Chief Justice Taney’s legal knowledge disparagingly with that shown by a colored keeper of an oyster cellar in Baltimore who had corrected some of his historical misinformation. Northerners regarded the situation with the greater alarm because Buchanan’s Administration, just entering office, was entirely committed to the slavery party, the President accepting Southern Cabinet members like Howell Cobb of Georgia and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi as his chief advisers. Bryant hinted his suspicion of a treasonable conspiracy between Chief Justice Taney and these Southern leaders. A new eloquence was animating the words in which he wrote of slavery:
Hereafter, if this decision shall stand for law, slavery, instead of being what the people of the slave States have hitherto called it, their peculiar institution, is a Federal institution, the common patrimony and shame of all the States, those which flaunt the title of free, as well as those which accept the stigma of being the Land of Bondage; hereafter, wherever our jurisdiction extends, it carries with it the chain and the scourge—wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery. If so, that flag should have the light of the stars and the streaks of running red erased from it; it should be dyed black, and its device should be the whip and the fetter.
Are we to accept, without question, these new readings of the Constitution—to sit down contentedly under this disgrace—to admit that the Constitution was never before rightly understood, even by those who framed it—to consent that hereafter it shall be the slaveholders’ instead of the freemen’s Constitution? Never! Never! We hold that the provisions of the Constitution, so far as they regard slavery, are now just what they were when it was framed, and that no trick of interpretation can change them. The people of the free States will insist on the old impartial construction of the Constitution, adopted in calmer times—the construction given it by Washington and his contemporaries, instead of that invented by modern politicians in Congress and adopted by modern politicians on the bench.
But in the territory of Kansas the decision for freedom was already being made by force of arms. Bryant and Bigelow had never ceased urging the dispatch of Northern settlers and breech-loading rifles to the Western plains. The poet had written his brother (Feb. 15, 1856) that the city was alive with the excitement of the Kansas news, and subscribing liberally to the Emigrants’ Aid Society. “The companies of emigrants will be sent forward as soon as the rivers and lakes are opened—in March, if possible—and by the first of May there will be several thousand more free-state settlers in Kansas than there now are. Of course they will go well armed.” After election day that fall he had proposed that the Republican campaign organization be kept functioning to speed the flow of settlers. The Tribune was simultaneously declaring that “The duty of the people of the free States is to send more true men, more Sharpe’s rifles, and more howitzers to Kansas.” Henry Ward Beecher, attending a meeting at which a deacon asked arms for seventy-nine men, declared that a Sharpe’s rifle was a greater moral agency than the Bible, and that Plymouth Church would furnish half the guns required; whence the familiar nickname, “Beecher’s Bibles.” Even Henry J. Raymond and the Times, in spite of their policy of not hurting Southern sensibilities, saw that the issue on the Platte must be fought out.
A letter from Osawatomie, Kansas, gave a vivid picture in the Evening Post of July 14, 1856, of the perils of the free-soil settlement there, and asked for funds sufficient to keep thirty or forty horsemen in the field, well mounted and armed with breechloading rifles, Colt’s revolvers, and sabers. Other pleas were backed by editorials. A month after the Dred Scott decision a correspondent writing from Leavenworth told how the North had rallied to meet the crisis. “Emigration to Kansas and Nebraska has now set in with wonderful vigor, and such force as none have anticipated. Every train from Boston and New York to St. Louis is crowded to excess. More boats are running on the Missouri River than ever before, yet all are crowded. I have been nearly a week on the river and have slept on the cabin floor every night, with some hundred of other bed- or rather floor-fellows, being unable to get a stateroom. It is estimated that 7,000 Kansas emigrants have landed at Kansas City since the opening of navigation, and thousands more have gone on to Wyandotte, Quindaro, Leavenworth, etc.... And still they come. A single party of a thousand persons was expected in St. Louis last Tuesday.” The later correspondence had an equally confident note, which was justified when in October the free-soilers swept the Territorial election.
When the pro-slavery legislators that autumn, faced with the loss of their control, hastily drew up the Lecompton Constitution, providing for the establishment and perpetuation of slavery, the Evening Post attacked them angrily. Its fear was that the Buchanan Administration would induce Congress, which was Democratic in both branches, to admit Kansas under this illegal instrument. Thayer, its Washington correspondent, wrote that the Administration leaders were employing bribery to that end. The protests of the Evening Post day in and day out contributed to the overwhelming Northern sentiment which made this fraud impossible.
While the Herald, Journal of Commerce, and Express were filled with horror by John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in the closing days of 1859, the Evening Post pointed to it as a just retribution upon the South for its own crimes. Douglas believed and said that the raid was the natural result of the teachings of the Republican party; Bryant believed it the natural result of that Southern violence which he had excoriated after Brooks’s assault upon Sumner. His editorials almost recall John Brown’s own favorite text: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.” Of course, he condemned the lawlessness of the act, but he did not believe Brown solely responsible: